Wood Shop

9/24/09 The furniture made it to its porch in Boston this week ...

And what a grand porch it was ... I was thinking the coffee table might be tight, but instead, it couldnt have been any smaller for the sclae of the porch ... perfect!

8/27/09
Im working with some friends/clients on furniture for their porch. Its a beautifu, spaciousl porch on a grand old home and we want to do it justice without filling it up so much that it feels crowded. I fooled around with a couple different layouts in my cad program and now that we have finished the chairs, were working on a size and shape for the coffee table. Fortunately , the client had stopped by last week just as the table/desk shown in a recent post was leaving and happened to get a good view of it just before we loaded it up. She had seen the wood at Open Studio back in May and coincidentally I had the smallest of the three slabs still on hand. The porch is longer than my finish room, but I had enough room to layout and mockup the business part where most of the furniture will go in full size, including the slab for the coffee table. We set it up on some scrap plywood that was a little shorter than I would have designed it, but it turned out it that lower was perfect. Good for feet, can also double as a bench, emphasizes the horizontal length of the seating layout and does a good job of standing up to the overall space of the porch ... Looks like itll work, and totally reinforces the concept of mocking things up in full size WHENEVER YOU CAN cause they always look different in person than they do on paper or in your minds eye. No substitute for the real thing, the real size, AND the real height. Taping it out on the floor just wont do .... Check it out ... Click the pictures to enlarge them ...

The actual porch

First Layout

Final Layout

The chairs in the shop ... 4 fixed, two rockers ... The real cushions will be ready next week

update 10/31 ... were on the home stretch on this project now. well be delivering the sideboard and table today and the 8 chairs later in the week. coincidentally, we have another dining room coming up next. an oval table (52 x 86), 8 chairs and a corner cupboard ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
the 8 chairs before the arms and the finishing ..
here we have our arm adding process. essentially, we use the mdf too keep the arm blanks parallel to the seat rails until we can do the joinery and the final shaping
the completed armchairs ...

10/16 ... on our website you can see a type of furniture we refer to as our studio style, which could also be thought of as a signature or default style ... the kind of stuff we have made for 25 years for many clients and for our own home. it design nidea originated with a client who spent some time in germany and commissioned us to build a custom desk for her like the furniture she saw when she lived there. i later came to understand that what she was describing to me was actually furniture in the biedermeier style. that was in 1986, before one of the definitive books on the style was published about 1992 and, believe it or not, before the internet and google even. so we kind of made it up on our own. these pieces are direct descendants of that german and austrian idea from the mid 1800s. must have been in my german blood. click the photos to enlarge them.
the construction process for these designs requires first building the piece and then completely disassembling it for the painting and varnishing. the pieces above are for the sideboard that is part of this commission. it is identical to one in my own home except that the center detail will be part of an oval instead of the angled geometric one in the photo below.
loyal readers have probably seen this one before ...
heres how it goes ... in the early stages, all the details are left flat so they can be registered with each other and then the shadows and bevels are cut when the individual pieces are disassembled for painting and finishing ...
at this point, nothing is glued, though the web frames are screwed to the insides of the face pieces, and the piece is completely rigid.
we leave the lower rail element uncut at this time too ... and then the drawer faces and the central element are fitted tightly in the holes. the final fitting happens after the case is finished and glued up ...
dovetail time ...
pulls and more finish tomorrow ...

the palette for this project is natural cherry and curly hard maple, with ebony and black milk paint details
here will is reassembling the table base that he made a few weeks ago.
the top and leaves of the table have a curly maple and ebony inlay that we routed out and filled back in. ... here lorne has finished installing the ebony borders before fitting up the 1/8th" central curly maple veneers.
once the bottom of the top is finished, the base is assembled and installed, the table is flipped, and the top is final scraped, sanded, and finished on its base ... runners again from our friends at moin hardware.
tah daahhhhh ... with the leaves in, before the fnish. 10 x 42" wide
a quick finish sample/palette study for the clients
we will be wrapping up the chairs and the sideboard this week ... delivery time soon ... more on all of it as we finish up ....
lots of pieces to keep track of ....